


Undone

by justanotherStonyfan



Series: Random AUs [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Discussions of death, Goats, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Nightmares, Non-Explicit Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Relationship Discussions, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, selectively mute Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25226557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherStonyfan/pseuds/justanotherStonyfan
Summary: You’d think, given everything, that if one of them were going to regress, that if one of them were going to break down, it would be Bucky.(Set mostly after Endgame - canon deaths remain but Steve doesn't leave)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Random AUs [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/727680
Comments: 53
Kudos: 229
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Undone

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a fill for my **'Unmarried Couple (or more)'** square from my Banned Together Bingo 2020 bingo card.
> 
> Thank you ZG for piking up my numerous mistakes!

You’d think, given everything, that if one of them were going to regress, that if one of them were going to break down, it would be Bucky. 

Bucky thought so.

~

When he leaves, walking away across the riverbank, squelching into the mud, he doesn’t know what his future looks like.

He doesn’t expect to have one. 

He knows little, except for that which is muted and distant, but he can operate any vehicle and speak any language and use any weapon, and what he does know is that he remembers the shadows of the name screamed at him, knows the whispers of a past he hadn’t known he could know that he’d had, the words said by this man becoming resounding color in a world he hadn’t known was black and white.

But above all else - the objective, the target, the Captain - he remembers:

Steve.

~

When Steve finds him, green and pink walls, and dust, and newsprint, Steve knows him too well to take the lie. Bucky knows him, knows him more every day, remembers everything. _Everything_. 

He fights, runs, stops running and then longing, rusted, furnace, no, _no_ -

~

Oh God.

Oh God, he knew this would happen.

***

Losing his arm is a cosmic joke at this point. Maybe it would be funnier if he couldn’t feel it.

Is this what ‘irreconcilable’ looks like?

***

There is no hope for him, that much is sure. No way for him to leave, to sequester himself away or disappear quietly.

It’s written on Steve’s face when he asks for cryo, in Steve’s eyes when he asks to be alone for treatment, in the set of Steve’s shoulders when Bucky tells him he needs time.

And he knows that Steve understands. Steve always understands - that’s why he doesn’t protest Bucky’s choice when Bucky goes under, why he doesn’t insist on being with him when Bucky’s deprogrammed, why he doesn’t put his life on hold and follow Bucky into long grass and gentle countryside. 

Bucky’s lost already, always has been, gone - he loves Steve. Steve loves him more than Bucky can bear to think about, Steve will do whatever Bucky asks of him.

And, although he doesn’t realize it at the time, for Steve, Bucky going back into cryo is losing him for the fourth time.

***

Medication - two-colored tubes and chalky white circles and dusty pink squares to be taken with a glass half full - and they’ll quiet the static and the intrusive thoughts that the doctor says everybody gets. Regular sessions with a female therapist because most of Hydra’s people were men, and he can’t talk to men about what they did to him. He progresses. It’s slow. But, little by little, he begins to claw his way back.

But handholds slip and love doesn’t always conquer all and,

“Steve-” and even as his body turns to dust around him, he knows it’s the _wrong choice._

As far as last things to say go, it’s great, he couldn’t wish for a better word to be the last word from his lips, but the look in Steve’s eyes, the blank shock on his face… 

Steve, Bucky thinks as his last thought, will never recover from losing him like this. Bucky doesn’t have much of a life to flash before his eyes, not really. Staticky sepia-toned memories that might just be pictures from history books, mixed with bright color knowledge of _a teacher, a priest, Becca, Mom, and Steve, Steve, Steve,_ and then seventy years that haunt his every waking moment a little less each day, the knowledge of what he’s done with the growing understanding that it wasn’t his fault even if he can’t ever forgive himself. A life lived, maybe, certainly a life that was going to be. 

He doesn’t have time to say “live on for me,” or “I love you,” or “don’t mourn me forever.” He has time to think ‘but I love you so much’ before there’s nothing and then…

 _Orange_ nothingness?

And he’s not the only one here.

***

And he knows Steve. He loves Steve, he and Steve are inseparable, two halves, pieces that fit. He should have _known_ that they’d come back to Steve standing alone in front of the biggest enemy they’ve ever faced, but Bucky’s always told him the same thing.

He doesn’t _have to_ do it alone. 

And they fight, because it’s still a fight. And Steve, bloody and broken and desperate and hopeless, he sees them and Bucky can read the emotion flowing from him.

_Thank God._

And then, after,

_Oh God._

***

Steve and Stark weren’t friends, not really. They knew each other, they worked together, but they weren’t friends. Steve had been to Stark’s parties, lived in Stark’s building.

But you don’t have to be friends with someone for them to leave a mark on you, for them to shape the way your life goes. A friend they both lost, though Bucky doesn’t think he deserves to be sad about it (Steve wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t listen, mourning Howard was for both of them regardless of what Bucky had been forced to do) and then the son who was older than them, both gone now. What a life. 

Steve’s older than Bucky is now, of course.

Stark’s funeral is small and understated, which was like him, actually. Flashy and showy was always just that - a show. And, though he liked to make an entrance, he had heart and soul and showed his love in ways you’d never notice. Small and quiet. In the end, half the universe owes their lives to one tiny gesture. 

But Natasha…

She did not take Bucky’s place. Nobody could, Steve told him. Sam either. But she was close to him, closer to him than any of them. He was an only child, and he and Bucky grew to be closer than family, grew to be more than just friends. But Bucky had a sister, a sister who became like a sister to Steve. He thinks that Natasha might have been Steve’s sister, too.

Steve, so many times, has had to make his own family, and he has lost them all, with a handful of exceptions. Out of all of the people he found in this century, he loved Natasha first, and most, and deepest. Out of all of them, Natasha died where he could not even see.

Steve is inconsolable. 

“You’ve been quiet,” Bucky says, after two days, when they’ve put away their black clothes and sequestered themselves away and Steve-

Bucky hasn’t seen Steve do this. When they were younger, he remembers vaguely that he’d had thoughts about how tough Steve was. How Steve never asked for help but would sometimes accept it as long as Bucky didn’t make it look like help. He remembers wondering if Steve would ever mention how bad he felt, but Steve never did. He’d admit it if Bucky asked the right way, but he wouldn’t say so himself. And then after the serum, when they both had something to hide, he remembers the number of times Steve would just shrug off an injury, heal while they rested, and carry on like nothing had happened. If Bucky strong-armed him into admitting it, in the quiet of a tent or the corner of a briefing room, he just might let somebody patch him up. 

Bucky remembers being tortured, remembers more all the time and…well, it’s a hell of a thing. He’s a broken human being, that much he’s sure of. There are nightmares and panic attacks and periods of depression and the list goes on, but he remembers wondering what it would take to break Steve. He remembers coming to sometimes and thinking Steve would never let himself be strapped to a table, restrained in a chair, Steve wouldn’t lose his being if someone said the right words. Nothing would break Steve. 

And so, “You’ve been quiet,” Bucky says, in the small, dusty calm of the room they’ve been provided - log cabin and hardwood floor and net curtain and Steve looks at him, just swings his head around and _looks_ him and Bucky’s on his feet and across the room in an instant, just as Steve’s hand comes up towards him.

When Steve lost his mother, there was no _human being_ in him. He didn’t cry and scream or rage and fight. He stood in the middle of his home and stared at Bucky as though there were no thoughts in his head, no heart in his chest. Mouth open, body still, expression vacant. Disbelief masked in terrified stillness, heartbreak shrouded by a grief too big to feel. It hadn’t lasted, of course - he’d grieved her properly eventually, whispered words and trembling limbs and confessions of feeling too much in an age where people liked to pretend you didn’t feel anything at all. 

This is not the same. There’s an age in Steve’s eyes that Bucky knows is in his own, a depth of what-they’ve-seen that can’t be forgotten, and Bucky always thought Steve was the stronger of the two of them. Bucky always thought Steve would be just fine without him - always figured Steve would wind up living without him. Steve always talked about ‘after’ the war, but Bucky never really believed there’d be one. 

In the split-second before Bucky reaches him, Bucky sees Steve’s face and recognizes that he’s never seen him look like this. His face is open and weak - there’s no locked jaw, no furrowed brow. Everything is wide and hurting, his eyes are liquid, his mouth is open and turned down - he looks horrified. _Terrified_ and, when Bucky reaches him, it’s not even a thought to do what he does. He’s right there with him, Steve’s head and shoulders pressed to his stomach, Steve’s hands making fists in his clothes, and he holds Steve close as he can.

Steve _weeps._ High and thin and wavering, he makes sounds that are quiet but sound unreal because they’re all the same. The same sound in lines, in rows, over and over with barely any breath between - he weeps, and he does so helplessly, uncontrollably.

Everything they’ve lost, everything they’ve been through, everything they’ve seen, everything they couldn’t save. 

Bucky clutches him close and they ride it out together, weeping too. It takes a long time.

***

It lasts, as well. Bucky thinks maybe that that’ll be it - that now he’s let go, now he’s cried for her, for them, for everything, he can move past it, but it seems only to have put him closer to it all the time. He wakes and eats, but his face creases in pain when he’s halfway through his toast or when he’s checking his phone. He spends his days being as alright as he can, but he stumbles in small ways that push him down in others.

It never gets as bad after that first time, but it’s bad. Bucky knows it must be hard for him. It’s hard for both of them, but he’s certain that he’s missing something. 

It’s not until they dare to ask - not until Bucky dares to ask - that Steve begins to settle. Bucky has one place in the world that he loves, that doesn’t fill him with half-remembered pictures, that won’t put them in the line of fire or at the call of duty, and he asks because, with Steve by his side, there’s only one thing that he wants, really. 

“I’d hate to outstay my welcome,” he says.

“Nonsense,” the King of Wakanda answers. “You? Are always welcome.”

Steve does badly at goodbyes - always did. But he does much worse at them now, having lost so many people. To Bucky, the people he’s lost are distant. Tempered by time and experience, it’s not nothing, but it isn’t raw. Bucky didn’t know anybody in this century, and he’s been living with the loss of his friends and family for the better part of a hundred years. Steve’s hurts are new. And he’s always been strongest at pushing through. He’s always been terrible at coping.

“Promise you’ll visit?” Bucky says to Sam, a wry smile on his face, and Steve squeezes Bucky’s hand as Bucky asks.

It’s agreement - as old as they are, nearly. When Steve couldn’t ask for soup, or tell Bucky he was gonna throw up, or speak to let Bucky know, he’d squeeze his hand. More than anything it’s a comfort, an affirmation.

Sam nods.

“Yeah, I guess I can be persuaded,” he says.

“You could come with us,” Bucky tells him, and Steve’s fingers grind his bones. 

“Nah, I got a team to run,” Sam says. 

_Captain America_ says.

Steve grasps Sam’s forearm and pulls him close, presses his forehead to Sam’s and his face is pale though his nose and his eyes are red. 

“Promise you’ll take care of this dumbass?” Sam says to Bucky, leaning back so he can look past Steve’s head. And then he tucks his chin down and looks at Steve. “Promise you’ll let Barnes take care’a you?”

Steve huffs what might be a laugh, but it’s thick and wet and it sticks in his throat. He nods. Then he lifts his head and turns it but stops. 

He looks for Natasha everywhere, a consequence of not seeing her die. He checks his phone for her. He gets out mugs enough for her, and checks off lists of things for her, and writes out things to remember to tell her. It’s barely been any time at all and he looks for Natasha _everywhere._ He’ll learn not to eventually. That’s the thing about Steve - he’s learned not to for a lot of people. Some more than once. 

They don’t speak when they’re in the air. They can both pilot but Bucky’s at the yoke, Steve’s not in any condition to do it himself, and Bucky thinks Steve might be sleeping but for the fact that his breathing doesn’t sound like that when he sleeps.

***

They walk together, and Steve walks like he hasn’t slept. He got a little in over the ocean but he’d been awake and staring out the window for the whole journey otherwise.

It’s not a revelation. Bucky doesn’t take days to figure it out. 

“Don’t feel like talkin’, huh?” and Steve presses his knuckles to his mouth and shakes his head, doesn’t look at Bucky. “Let me ask you somethin’ pal,” he says soft as he can, and Steve’s head turns towards him first, his mind a little slow to follow, his gaze slower still. “You think I’m gonna force you to talk when you don’t want to?”

Steve drops his hand away and looks skeptical and Bucky doesn’t know what he’s thinking of - the serum didn’t make either of them….well, it didn’t make _Bucky_ psychic, maybe it did with Steve, but that’s besides the point. Bucky doesn’t know what Steve’s thinking of, but the look on his face makes Bucky think of Brooklyn, of when Steve used to get sick during the summers and sicker during the winters, when he couldn’t tell people what he wanted for being ill, couldn’t answer or question. Bucky learned to figure him out then, learned to notice every tilt of his head, every quirk of his brow.

Steve learned the same thing, too - Steve could read him like a book after a few years of his being ill. So it’s not hard to see that Steve’s confused.

“I said you think I’m gonna force you to talk when you don’t want to?”

And Steve stares at him for a moment, and then his gaze flicks aside for just a moment, guilty. 

“Pal, you don’t gotta feel bad about it,” he says. “You think I ain’t never had a day I didn’t wanna talk? I can hear you loud and clear whether you use your words or not, you don’t wanna talk, don’t talk.”

And Steve looks at him. Looks and looks until his brows turn up and his mouth goes tight, and Bucky shakes his head.

“Don’t matter what you been through, what matters is how you feel, right?” 

Steve’s shoulders drop maybe two inches, and Bucky can hear his stupid voice doing that stupid thing his therapist told him about. His Wakandan therapist has been a literal lifesaver on one or two occasions, and has changed Bucky’s whole outlook almost everywhere else in his life. She has some pretty good little phrases that Bucky repeats to himself a lot, and one of them is,

“Moping about who’s worse won’t make you feel better. It ain’t a competition - you feel how you feel, and that’s where we start. Okay?”

Steve just stares at him, with such sadness and such longing, and Bucky goes to him and wraps Steve’s head in his arms, holds Steve close to him. 

“You mook,” he says. “You putz, I love you. I _love_ you, you don’t gotta be sorry with me for who you are, you ever let me be sorry with you?”

Steve’s arms come up around his torso, Steve pushes himself closer. 

“You _idiot,”_ Bucky tells him, because Steve is smart and good and kind but he’s hurt himself so much refusing to lean on other people, he’s hurt himself so much refusing to back down - he is hurt, and he’s been hurt, and he’s had to lose everyone he’s ever loved, had to put himself aside to be a leading light, he had to walk up to Thanos with his head held high and nobody left to help him, and Bucky nearly lost him. 

Bucky nearly lost Steve, Steve nearly died where Bucky couldn’t help him - it wouldn’t have been the first time. 

“You idiot,” Bucky says, because he means _thank God, thank God,_ “I love you. Whatever you need, we’ll get through this together.”

Steve, unsurprisingly, doesn’t say a goddamned thing.

***

Where they live, it’s more than a little place. Bucky doesn’t mind being out with the animals or in with the air conditioning, he loves both, just like he loves being out of the city, just like he loves being in the city.

Everywhere here is beautiful - it doesn’t matter where they are. And, for a while, he yearned for Brooklyn. He longed for the little alleyways and the crowded apartments, for the smell of the summer (regardless of how bad it smelled in the summer) and the sparkle of the frosts in winter but he learned, little by little, that the places he’d known were places he didn’t know any longer. The Brooklyn he remembered was long gone, Europe long-changed, and after everything that had happened before they’d made it to Wakanda, Wakanda felt more like home than anything. 

Wakanda had brought Bucky back to himself, he didn’t doubt that for a minute. A lot of people had worked damned hard to make sure he felt like a person again, and he never felt as much of a person as he did when he was safe under hologram and stasis shield. 

Their routine, Bucky decides, will be much the same as his own was during recovery. They’ll feed the animals in the morning, work the land if it needs it by day, and spend the rest of their time together. That, really, seems to be Steve’s only want out of the whole thing - that Bucky stays near him.

So Bucky does. 

“Not in front of the kids,” he says, smiling against Steve’s mouth when Steve, sweaty with the afternoon’s work, snags his waist and hauls him close where Bucky’s standing next to the grazing goats, beard scratching his neck until they’re mouth to mouth. 

Bucky’s got a beard, too, it’s sort of hilarious.

“Bet we look like two birds nests together,” he says, when Steve kisses him of a morning, and that’s the thing, Steve’s eyes sparkle whenever he pulls Bucky close, and Bucky feels his teeth as he smiles too. 

“You takin’ care ‘a me?” he says, raising an eyebrow when Steve puts food on the table, Steve carefully and quietly crossing himself once he’s taken a seat and, when Steve finishes his prayer, the ‘yes’ is clear in his eyes. 

But he doesn’t speak. 

It isn’t that he can’t, either. For a day or so, Bucky thought perhaps that Steve was mute, that it wasn’t under his control. But the soft sounds he made in his sleep, the gentle repetition of Bucky’s name when they made love, the distant yelp of a man who’s hammered his thumb and not the nail, it all spoke to something else. After the lattermost, Bucky went to find him to find Steve sitting on the floor near one of the pens, surrounded by goats, scratching each one in turn with one hand while he sucked the thumb of his other hand - silent reassurance that the animals seemed to understand. 

It’s not that he has no voice, it’s that he can’t bring himself to use it. And Bucky can understand that. Their lives have been so loud, their fights so all-consuming, their nightmares so overwhelming. They don’t need to speak to communicate, so why should they?

When Steve wakes one night while the heavens are open, a night they’re staying in the hut down by the animals, it’s hot and humid. They’d brought enough food down from the house to eat for lunch and for their evening meal, and so they simply stayed where they were as the sun set, watching the fireflies wake, watching the birds come in to roost, watching the milky way rise as a bright, glittering band against a sky so deep it was almost purple. They went to bed together, held close under a simple bedsheet, on top of simple pillows, but Bucky wakes to something it takes him a little while to understand. Pressure moves, breathing shifts - when he figures out what the pressure is, he thinks for a moment Steve is trying to put out a fire with his palms, but it turns out it’s not that at all.

“Bucky?” he says, and then again. “Bucky!?” 

“I’m here,” Bucky answers, and catches one of Steve’s wrists, and then Steve’s hands are on him, patting him all over until he can figure out where Bucky is in the dark. 

Inside the hut, with no light outside and a cloth covering in the doorway, there’s not even enough light for supersoldier eyes. It takes Steve only a moment or two to figure out where Bucky is, but then he’s grasping Bucky’s shoulders, his head, pulling Bucky tight against him. Bucky goes, he doesn’t mind. He understands.

“I’m here,” he says again, softly this time, against Steve’s skin. “I’m here, sweetheart, enough. We’ve given enough.”

Bucky has never seen Steve on his knees in desperation, has never had Steve cling to him the way he does then - together on the ground, breathless with it, voiceless with it, with one word a whisper on his lips. 

“Please,” and Bucky’s never heard his voice wrench this way, never seen him shake like this. “Please.”

Steve holds him just like that for a long while, and Bucky pulls the cloth door down after that, so that they can see the blanket of stars whenever they wake, can see each other in the night, can rise with the sun. Steve clings for the rest of the night, voice soft over breathless pleasure after, and he stays close to Bucky for the rest of the following day. 

But the same is true - as Bucky knew it would be - when their situations are reversed. 

When he wakes disorientated and terrified on the couch in their air-conditioned house, it’s Steve who speaks his name calmly and easily, Steve who offers his presence as a balm. 

Steve will call his name over fields and hills if he has a need to, Steve will soothe the animals with nonsense sounds if it’s necessary, but the rest of the time he’s quiet. His laughter has faded to gentle chuckles at most, his fitful sleep near silent, and his pleasure becomes gasps and sighs and reverent repetitions of Bucky’s name where he was laughter and desperation before. 

“I love you,” Bucky tells him one night, when they’re face to face, as he’s carding his fingers through Steve’s hair, and Steve says it back, soft and quiet.

Steve is bigger than him now, though not by as much as when he first got the serum, and Bucky’s wrapped in his arms today. Cool air and light clothes, they’re close together and half asleep, and Steve's face is open. It will take a long time before he stops looking so tired, Bucky knows. It took a long time to stop looking so tired himself.

“Something’s going to come for us,” Steve says on a different night. “Something always comes for us.”

But it’s not like that any more. Not after everything that’s happened. The universe is still recovering, the world has no need to look for them. If something ever does come for them, it won’t be looking for them, they’ll just be caught up in it, and at least then they’ll be together. 

“Rest,” Bucky tells him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he can’t guarantee it for the rest of his life. One of them will die first, likely as not, but it doesn’t have to be for decades. The way the two of them are, it might not be for centuries. Nobody can tell them with any certainty, not really, but if Bucky spent the next hundred years in silence with him, days wrapping themselves around the two of them like cocoons, Bucky’d be happy.

***

The world doesn’t really exist on days like these or, at least, they exist outside of it.

He wanted it to look like a dream, that was the idea. To wake up and look down the lengths of their bodies and perhaps feel like their home was a paradise that matched how it felt to be with him. White and cream, layers of fabrics and wide, tall windows in their home, with a bed that’s firm enough to settle them both. Or else earthy browns and patterned fabrics in the hut down by the animals, feet tangled shadows against the starry sky. 

Sometimes they don’t move for hours, of course, and it goes like that, in cycles. Frenzied and then slow and then stop, just because they’re together. 

“The thing is,” Bucky says softly one evening, in the hut near the animals, pressed together with only the walls of the hut between them and the driving rain, the bright streaks of lightning, one of many that they’ve spent apart from the world at large, “I don’t need a ring or a ceremony. If you want one, we’ll have one. If you want one, I’ll make sure it’s visible from space but me, I don’t need one.”

Neither of them do, not really, not the way they used to. They are who they want to be to each other already.

They can be safe here, he knows that. Bucky’s in contact with Sam, and T’Challa, and sometimes Steve appears in the background of those calls, sometimes he’ll wave but, really, Steve doesn’t seem to care where he is as long as Bucky’s with him.

And so they do feed the animals in the morning, they do work the land if they need to during the day. Otherwise they spend their time together, reading, drawing, learning together, spending time together, making love together, living their lives quietly and away from anyone else. They whistle to the animals and hum with their chores, and sometimes, when Bucky says ‘I love you,’ Steve says it right back to him, in murmurs, or whispers. And it’s nice to hear it sometimes, but most of the time they don’t talk. They don’t need to.

They’ve given enough. Everything they need to say is said with eyes and mouths and bodies, and the rest of the world can fade away.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t like the idea of things breaking Steve. It doesn’t work for me in-character - how would you break Steve Rogers? Well, imo, it’s the same way you’d break Bucky Barnes - you couldn’t, unless you take away who they are as a person, empty their brain, and make them a shell to be programmed. But I like the idea of Steve being helpless against relief. The way the MCU is written, if you’re being pedantic, Steve loses Bucky in New York, in the Alps, after TWS, in Wakanda, AND at the snap, and I thought “you know, if I lost someone that many times and then got them back _again,_ I might start to lose my grip on reality” so there you go, here’s this. Unrealistic but fun to have a go writing.


End file.
